The Kids Are All Right: Same-Sex Family Drama

The problem with most gay and lesbian themed movies is generally that this is an underserved genre: small budgets, novice actors, and undeveloped scripts focused on immature characters give most of these films the feeling of high-school drama, and even if they have a certain kind of appeal for their audience, they feel largely uninspired as film form.

The Kids Are All Right, the new movie about a same-sex couple and their two teenage kids, strives valiantly to rise above the limitations of its genre. With a fine ear for family dialogue and a stellar cast at the helm (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as the couple, and Mark Ruffalo as the male interloper who is the unwanted sperm donor for the two kids), the movie feels like something more: like a keenly felt exploration of adult, family dynamics, no matter what the orientation of the parents.

Yet it’s sometimes hard to tell if it’s writer / director Lisa Cholodenko (Laurel Canyon / "The L World") who’s creating the fine moments in the film, or the actors. The story wants to go in a direction that feels constrained and false, suggesting that Ruffalo (who plays Paul in the film, a restaurateur and motorcycle-driving Zen-spouting Californian) really is an interloper and half-loser who would rather take over this family than start his own. Or that Bening’s Nic is inattentive and domineering and Moore’s Jules is aimless and polymorphous, leading them to a family argument that is a culmination of the unhappiness in their relationship. Yet the actors all bring out a humor and humanity in the characters that make them more than their roles in the film; they feel like fully realized human beings, interesting if flawed people who are worthy of our time and each other’s.

At the same time, there is definitely a novice quality to the film’s direction and editing, especially in the first act. Scenes that hang a second too long or dialogue delivered with flat inflection at times gives the film a Todd Haynes’ “surfacy” tone, as if we’ve stumbled into stinted parody, when what the director is really after is a casual authenticity. I’m afraid this may confuse many in the audience into taking the characters and their desires less seriously than they deserve.

Where the movie shines is when it’s delivering its unique, quirky insights, such as when Jules tries to explain to her fifteen year old son, who’s accidentally found their hidden sex tape, why the two women enjoy watching gay male porn when having sex. She gets tumbled up trying to explain the difference between inside and outside erogeny, and the moment feels both authentic and unique, making us realize just how rare it is not only to see a female-headed household on film, but any depiction of a real adult relationship or the genuine travails of child-rearing.

Leading what they think is a normal gay, middle-class life, the happy same-sex household gets distracted from their normal issues when the children decide they want to find their sperm donor. Played with charming roguishness by Ruffalo, Paul is both an adult child and a successful entrepreneur (I love his home, with their expansive gardens ripe for planting). He immediately takes a shine to the kids, and they to him, and slowly insinuates himself into the family. Again, the way that Paul falls in love with his newly found progeny, and they with him, endears us both to the characters and their dilemma.

All of this is supremely weighty and interesting. It’s a shame, then, that the movie feels it needs to create artificial drama by instigating an affair between Jules and sperm donor Paul. It isn’t just that sex with a man is politically incorrect – though one suspects that Cholodenko is testing the audience a bit with this. It’s that the affair looms up and crushes all the gentle insights that have come before. For one, it feels false, a plot development coming from the writer than more authentically from the characters, who after raising two find children, one hopes is smarter than this. For another, the false drama of the affair crushes the types of family insights we’d gotten before, and the trajectories of the son and daughter, never mind the two women, are cut short. Instead of stock lesbian accusations that their sperm donor is an interloper, we should be seeing how the son has resolved his self-esteem issues with his violent (and possibly secretly gay) friend; how the daughter has gotten out from under her mothers’ thumbs; how the two women will navigate their relationship now that their daughter is leaving home.

We don’t get to see any of that, and it’s a bit frustrating that the movie has chosen to focus on the sperm donor “issue” instead of the genuine family dynamics. I left the movie feeling that Paul had gotten the short end of the deal. He actually seemed to make a good father, and there was no reason the movie couldn’t have found a way to integrate him into the family (as Dennis Lim has pointed out in the NY Times, as many gay families have done with a biological parent). Instead, the movie seems to go out of its way to justify excluding him, and one can’t help but feel it’s succumbed a bit to ideology over good writing.

Just like an earlier generation of gay movies, then, this one similarly feels like it has the weight of representation on its shoulders, and perhaps in attempting to deal with all the “hot button” issues that a lesbian couple raising children face, it could have benefited by allowing itself to be simply quirky and true. Just as the parents feel pressure to make sure their kids are perfect, the filmmaker seems to feel pressure to deal head-on with core issues of same-sex child-rearing. Yet out of the corners of this film peaks some unexpected characters and discovered joy. That’s where its strength as a film lies; not in its depiction of a key gay / lesbian issue, but in its depiction of a family.

Scott Pilgrim versus the World: Teenage Life as Video Game

In Scott Pilgrim versus the World, director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) sets out to create the imaginative world of a countercultural teenager as seen through the pop-culture maze of video games, computers, and television sit-coms. He uses imaginative sound editing (such as the laugh-track to Good Times and various Batman-esque THWACKS and DOINGS) as well as creative animations, Fight-Club-like closed captioning, rock music, and amplification arrows to create a unique look that crosses Anime comics with various slam-cut edits all to successful result. The effect is that of having one’s head locked inside an iPod that’s being randomly tuned to various internet music stations while simultaneously trying to play Donkey Kong on a unicycle, but it largely works; that is, if you’re a teenager looking to enjoy a unique interpretation of your concerns about dating, dumping, and being dumped.

The namesake, Scott Pilgrim (played with whispiness set on ten by Michael Cera) plays base in a three-man (two man and one woman) local Toronto punk band. Where the movie is most inspired is in how deeply down into local, Toronto punk culture it wants to go, creating a world of cheap basement apartment rentals, band battles, and inside jokes that gives the movie a rare authenticity (one of the most pleasing aspects of the film is how well it avoids the feeling of mass-produced multiplex fare). Scott, improbably, plays the base, and even more improbably, the band is actually good. He does have that oh-too-common teenage movie problem, however, which is a deep insecurity with girls. Currently dating an Asian high-school student (Cera’s character is in his mid-twenties – as are most of the main characters – even though their concerns all feel a bit younger), Cera was mercilessly dumped by an ex-girlfriend who is back in town with an even more awesome band of her own, and he has yet to get over the sting, even as he courts Ramona Flowers, a new-in-town rocker-chick who is even cooler, and has set his strings afire.

Ramona, however, comes with some heavy baggage of her own: specifically, seven “evil X’s,” all of whom Pilgrim must defeat if he is to be able to continue dating her. Those defeats happen as pure video-game send-up, with each evil X vaporizing into a stash of coins at the end of each battle. The movie takes its sweat time setting all this up, but once the game is in play, it’s pretty much Mario Brothers all the way from there.

The evil X’s allow from some fun cameos, including Chris Evans as a Jean-Claude-Van-Dam-like action star with a penchant for skateboards, Brandon Routh as a white-haired rock-boy with Vegan powers, Jason Swartzman as a successful club promoter (yeah, right), and Thomas Jane posing as the Vegan Police. There’s also Kieran Culkin as Pilgrim’s gay roommate (or more accurately, post-gay roommate: the two of them share a bed, and it isn’t an unusual occurrence for Pilgrim to wake up to a few extra warm bodies under the covers). Even if the film follows a traditional win-the-girl / win-your-self-esteem trajectory, it also seems to exist in an alternative youth culture of ambi-sexuality, musical appreciation, and post-modern irony that the script takes for granted, which is secretly quite pleasing. Rather than dumb down the characters, as similar films of this genre might, this film takes youth culture as serious stuff (I think of something like Dude, Where’s My Car, which has a similar cultural tourism but not nearly the same ironic jouissance. Dude may have more laughs per minute, but Pilgrim feels like being beamed with a teenager ray for two hours). I would have loved this movie when I was twenty-two. Even more if I were in a Toronto punk band.

Which may be part of the problem with the movie. The detail is great, but the obsessions here feel very specific, much like a teenager themselves. The technique of the film also begins to grate on the nerves after about ten minutes, since everything in Pilgrim’s purview is given all the attention of an interstitial internet commercial that’s cut off just before the punch line. At twenty minutes I seriously considered walking out; perhaps my old brain simply wasn’t making connections between the noise and bombast fast enough to keep my eyes focused. By thirty minutes in, however, you start to tune out the slam-cut editing and sonic assault and start to assemble the story, though it’s quite possible that younger viewers, who have fewer references in their brain they’re trying to associate, will arrive at that saturation point sooner. There’s also Cera’s unceasing narration, which starts off pedantic but eventually rises to delightful insight once the Evil X’s come on the scene, stirring things up with delightful superpower mischief.

Once it gets going, it’s a wholly original movie, then, but I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t want to suffer the entire thing. Two hours of purely distilled teenage irony with heavy layers of techno-culture, punk music, Anime, metrosexuality, and video-game philosophy just isn’t for everyone.

Middle Men: An Internet Gangster Story (With Heart)

Strip away (no pun intended) the internet jargon, e-commerce and .dot-com millionaires, and "Middle Men" is essentially a gangster movie centering on porn, money, and cops, and mobster shakedowns, not too dissimilar from other stalwarts of the genre ranging from Get Shorty to Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels.

The difference is that Middle Men is supposedly inspired by a true story. The other difference is that it portrays an compelling portrait of the birth of the online porn industry. Its tale of mobster interest, murder, underage porn, and middle-eastern terrorists infatuated with a 24-year-old's porn site is both plausible enough to feel authentic and exaggerated enough to deliver a satisfyingly tense storyline of an essentially good family guy who gets in too deep with fuck-ups, the FBI, and mobsters.

Luke Wilson plays Jack Harris, a Houston businessman, married with two kids, who just happens to know a slew of shady characters. Screenwriter and director George Gallo spends the first act jumping around Jack's timeline from 2004 to 1988 to the mid-nineties, establishing his business savvy and experience with various minor gangsters and know-it-alls, interspersing his story with little visual essays on the various ways in which men find to whack off, giving the movie a kind of mocumentary meets "Sopranos" feel.

But where Gallo is really going is deeply into how Jack hooks up with a pair of high-strung losers - Wayne and Buck, played with pitch perfect wackiness by Giovanni Ribisi and Gabriel Macht - who have inadvertently invented the first online credit-card payment system while trying to get tittie pictures onto the internet. Wayne and Buck have involved themselves with some bad-ass Russian mobsters, and Jack has been invited in by his old friend, Jerry Haggerty (James Caan) to help extract the two from their mess. In the process, Jack has the bright idea that they shouldn't be making porn themselves; they should instead just get a 10% cut of everyone else who wants to collect an online payment. In essence, they can get even richer if they just make themselves the web porn middle-men.

That's essentially what they do, although in the process of paying off the mob, Jack gets one of the mobsters inadvertently killed. This leads to all sorts of trouble for Jack...as do Wayne and Buck, who even when they become .dot-com millionaires never get their shit together.

The rest is basically the standard genre mob story, but I found it refreshingly compelling. Until now, things like online credit-card payment gateways seemed way too nerdy for something like a Giovanni Ribisi drugs and porn cut-up flick, let alone murder and lurking FBI agents, yet Gallo pulls it off, explaining it all while keeping the cut-em-up pace going.

No doubt there are some diversions here from the "true story," but as someone who has worked in the industry (internet, not porn), I can attest that these crazy connections with Russian mobsters and porn stars is not so far fetched. If anyone lived through the "dot com bubble" can remember, it was an entire zeitgeist. The business about FBI agents tracking down terrorists with porn sites may be a bit of a stretch...but it's fun, nevertheless (although Chris Mallick, the producer of the film upon whose life this story is based, claims that even the FBI stuff really happened.)

Gallo keeps the movie at a personal level, however, ultimately testing Jack's mettle in life-and-death situations. Why I think I like this movie so much is that it ultimately espouses an ethos: that a man of honor earns respect, even from the most ruthless people. And Jack ultimately learns a lesson. He's asked to give up all the money and "addiction," as he calls it, to the fast lane of sex, drugs, and wealth in exchange for a human connection. And even though he does so to essentially save his own skin, the movie suggests that that connection ultimately means more.

In a day and age when so many movies espouse an easy nihilism, this may seem like simple gangster moralism. And in fact, Jack has a discussion with Audrey Dawns, his live-in porn actress, about the difference between mere moralism and what's essentially the act of saving one's soul. Jack, and the movie, opt for the latter. It's not a complicated decision, and its certainly forced upon him by circumstance, but nice to see a movie advocating for personal meaning for a change.

That may make the movie sound more straight than it is. Trust me, it's got a full quotient of guns, ass, and drugs, so it earns a bit of family sentiment by the end. Part of the success here is Wilson, who manages to balance both boyish sincerity and real-man swagger. This may be his first real adult role, but he wears the part well, and serves as a nice foil for the crazy shenanigans of Wayne, Buck, and Haggerty.

An object lesson, then, in how a simple genre plot, a life lesson, and a bit of recent history can be combined into an original, entertaining romp. And it doesn't hurt when you've got actors like Wilson, Ribisi, Macht, and Caan to make it all zing.

Dinner for Schmucks: Who's the Bigger Schmuck?

Let’s start with this. What is a schmuck, exactly? It’s a Yiddish word with a dual meaning – both a dupe (as in, “what a schmuck” said the car dealer when he sold the guy a lemon) and an asshole (as in “what a schmuck” when that guy spills your soda as he crams past you at the baseball game).

Properly, the role played by Steve Carroll (as Barry) in this movie isn’t a schmuck, but a schlemiel. A schlemiel is a supremely careless guy, and a bit of a shut-in, who ruins everything he contacts. And a schlimazel is, in the old Jewish joke, “the person upon whom the schlemiel spills his soup.” That puts Paul Rudd (as Tim) in the role of the schlimazel whose life is nearly ruined by his encounter with Carroll’s schlemiel.

The set up, taken from an earlier French film (whose translation is roughly "dinner for dolts" - a more accurate description and a film which was, by the way, nominated for several awards), is this: Tim works for a wealthy hedge fund. He labors away on the entry-level 6th floor until one day, someone from the executive floor is fired, and there’s an opening for a promotion. Tim sees his chance and makes a move to pitch a German millionaire to take over his antiques business as a way of getting the firm to manage his money. The only catch is this: the executives on the 9th floor have this little ritual of “dinner for schmucks,” which is that they each find one laughable, oddball loser that they bring over for dinner at the CEO’s mansion, whereupon they have a contest to see which guest is the oddest. The one who has brought the “winner” wins the approbation of the group.

The problem with this movie is that it wants to have it both ways – it wants to both get some laughs out the oddballs, just like the executives, as well as romp in moral approbation that anyone would stoop to such a thing. The real “schmucks,” the movie wants to say, are the executives. Thus we get Tim’s disapproving girlfriend, a museum curator who herself Is a bit too involved with a pompous, hairy-chested Matthew-Barney type artist (Jemaine Clement, de-nerded from "Flight of the Concords"). Clement's Kieran gallumps through his modernist apartment with literally nothing but a fig leaf and hooves as he photographs himself in various stages of coitus with painted women, and I suppose he is meant to be a counterpart to the loser oddballs, suggesting there is a very fine line between kooks and geniuses.

If only the movie went with that. Instead, what happens is predictable sit-com. The girlfriend, carelessly drawn in by Kieran’s charisma, is also a bit of a downer (even though she’s French) who thinks this whole dinner idea is for the birds. After swearing to his girlfriend that he’d never stoop to such a low contest, Tim literally runs into Barry as he’s picking a mouse off the street for his latest mouse diorama. It’s a stroke of fate, or so Tim exclaims, and he’s just as quickly changed his mind and invited Barry to the dinner.

Then the movie veers completely off track and into some variation of Cable Guy, as Barry begins to ruin Tim’s life before they even get to the party. There are various stunts involving ex- girlfriends, tax auditors, the German millionaire, and a destroyed Porsche (the moment I first saw that nice car enter the fame I knew it was toast). All of this seems completely off track as we haven’t even had dinner and the only schmuck, it seems, was me for buying a ticket.

Things pick up once the ensemble cast of schlemiels, schlimazels, schmucks, and oddballs all assemble for dinner, but really, aside from some nice moments of fake hypnotization, not much funny happens. The script seems too concerned with both trying to entertain us with oddball behavior and turning the schmucky executives into bad-guys for wanting to be entertained by various ho-hum losers. That puts the audience in a weird place of both being the schmuck and the schlimazel (and with Carroll's schlemiel, as the picture's centerpiece, never quite achieving either endearing quirkiness or the existential threat that say, Jim Carrey does in Cable Guy), and the movie never develops a coherent message.

The real problem here is that the movie lacks the courage of its premise. What would be funny would be to go with the idea of laughing at oddballs and take it, unembarrassed, to its logical conclusion. What would that say about our current elite? Are there really, perhaps, people who are just too weird to be lovable? Either, or both, of those would be interesting social commentary ripe for mining some nice satire.

I have a feeling the original film may have gone for the jugular like that. Instead, in this washed out Americanized version, the movie wants to take the politically correct, inoffensive approach of loving everyone’s weirdness and condemning the oafish rich (Tim ends up the movie losing his job, but he’s happier for it). It’s inoffensive, all right, but it just isn’t true. And neither is it funny, very much.

Salt: Cold War Pot Boiler Misses Mark

The title of the new movie Salt, starring Angelina Jolie as a CIA agent with a mysterious identity, is meant to share several connotations: SALT as in the treaty with Russia; Salt as in “salt in the wound.” And “salt,” a moniker of grit and determination, as in “salty sailor.”

Sadly, each of these sounds more interesting than the movie makes of it.

The movie starts with a promising set-up. Salt is has been captured in North Korea, where she’s tortured; she’s released after her long-suffering husband has struggled to get her out. For a CIA agent, she goes back home to a remarkably placid suburban life: trading cereal-breakfast bon mots with her arachnid-studying husband and taking care of their cute terrier (the dog is here to signal that Salt, salty as she is, has a nurturing side.)

The character is a kind of rudimentary James Bond: asexual and stoic, Salt may have just as well have been played by a man as by a desexualized Angelina Jolie.

Soon, however, a strange Russian defector walks into her office, and she and her boss (Liev Schreiber) have to debrief him only to find a puzzle: he claims that Salt is not really Salt at all, but a Russian double-agent who was planted in American society years ago, as a child, only to be activated today, for a special assignment: to assassinate the Russian president while visiting America for the funeral of the American Vice President.

Naturally, Salt – highly trained at evasion and mayhem – decides to go on the lam, claiming to her protective boss and the suspicious Internal Affairs officer (Chiwetal Ejiofor, who played a similar beleaguered government official in Roland Emmerich’s 2012) that she’s really running out of concern for her husband’s safety. We even get to see her rescue her dog, just to make the point that we’re to root for her.

Here’s where the movie breaks down, and maybe it’s because recent events have made the remaining story of Soviet spies, Cold War, and spies on the lam seem so quaint. The most interesting thing about the recent gaggle of undercover Soviet spies weren’t that they were dangerous, but that they’d become so influenced by American society that they were more interested in home mortgages than in uncovering secret documents. One of the spies wrote home to her handlers in Russia for permission to buy their house, “because that’s what people do in America, and we feel we should do that to blend in.”

Once her cover is “blown,” Salt has no concern about blending in – in fact, just the opposite, she uses the opportunity to go on a kind of wild spree of espionage and revenge – and the movie decides to reveal the answer to the mystery right in the middle of the second act, deflating any remaining tension. There’s even a moment after Salt has killed an entire boat full of Russian mobsters and spies when the movie takes an audible pause, as if thinking to itself, “well, where can we go from here?”

Where it decides to go next is a kind of high-stakes assassination-fest lifted from the plot of Eagle Eye, but it doesn’t really matter. By this time, we know who Salt is: a Cold-War era cartoon character being set up not by the KGB, but by the studio. In the end, Salt turns out to be a kind of triple-agent – and influenced by her life in America after all. Her first cover has been blown, but not her second, and she offers herself up to be turned by the Internal Affairs chief into another kind of operative, one who can operate off the books assassinating bad-guy Russians in innumerable sequels, a kind of Russian Doll version of James Bond.

The only problem is that the Russians aren’t the bad guys anymore – in fact, they are suffused with capitalism, and can barely get their own spies to give up their legitimate advertising agencies. One might excuse this film for trafficking in bulky Russian goons, DefCon 2 alerts, and rogue spies out for murderous revenge if this were 1988, but here and now, the movie feels not only stiff and wooden, but determinedly out of date.

Inception: Deep, and Yet, Not

Christopher Nolan, director of such deliciously esoteric fare as Memento and dark, blockbuster monsters like Batman: The Dark Knight, is deftly trying to do two things at once in the crowd pleaser, Inception: explore his obsession with dreams and memory, and create an action thriller that combines Bourne-Identity intrigue with Matrix-like stunt chases.

He pretty much pulls it off. One can't help but be reminded in this movie of Scorcese's recent Shutter Island, also staring LeonardoDiCaprio as a detective, of sorts, who gets pulled into a psychological trap of his own making. The two movies share the same logical DNA, giving DiCaprio an absence wife and psychological wound out of the same playbook – even the two houses that the DiCaprio's dream of in their subconscious seem like they come from the same plush suburban neighborhood.

Each movie is the creation of its director, however, so while Shutter Island takes the form of a gritty police procedural / haunted house chase, Nolan is going for something much broader and a bit more trippy. Those trailers of the city blocks raising up overhead and folding over on top of you tell you what Nolan is after here: a flexible world with no rules of physics that can mix the latest CGI effects with a good old-fashioned “Mission Impossible” action thriller.

The movie opens with Cobb (DiCaprio) and his team performing what they term an “extraction” – entering with their subject into a shared dream, where they physically must find the room where the subject has metaphorically locked away some hidden secret. Essentially they are corporate spies, and the dream story is a literal metonymic interpretation of the symbol of “locking away” a secret. This kind of psychology doesn’t exactly have the texture that one might get from Freud, say – it traffics exclusively in pop-culture understandings. The movie is content to stay on this pop-culture level throughout. But that’s okay, since it’s given itself enough to do in trying to set up its various dream worlds.

It turns out that one level of dreaming isn’t enough deception to delude their subject, and they have to take them down another level – a dream within a dream – and it’s in these maze-like levels of interlocking dreams where the movie wants to romp, and have its fun. This particular subject gets wise even with two dream states (the carpet he was lying on apparently had been changed in reality, and he notices the difference). In exchange for protecting the extraction team from their failure, the subject gives them a new challenge: instead of an extraction, he wants them to perform an “inception” – actually planting a new memory into a subject.

Cobb knows how to do this because he’s done it before, and it had something to do with his wife, and here we start to get the clues of the movie’s ultimate psychology. Like Shutter Island, we’re building up to a big revelation in the end, and one should never trust a movie that starts from the outset with the intention to play with our grasp on reality. Despite the attempt to lose us in a maze of different realities, I found Nolan’s ultimate destination here a bit predictable.

Even so, getting there is pretty fun. Nolan eventually has a team of different personalities all digging into a reality that’s at least four (or maybe, more?) levels deep. There’s a little invented device of a time distortion – the deeper you go, the more time slows down, so what’s seconds at level one is decades at level four. What I liked most was how Nolan creates a device (the movie calls this a “kick”) that synchronizes the dreamers at all the various levels, and drives everyone back to their waking states at the same moment in time. That’s some pretty deft editing to juggle all those story lines and locations and keep it all straight in audiences’ minds, let alone have them all “kick” at the same climax, and the movie does this fantastically.

Nolan adds a bit of genius casting by having Ellen Page, of Juno fame, play a young protege of Cobb’s who becomes his “architect” – a person who helps him populate the physical puzzle of the dream worlds. Page's Adriadne is a bit young to be roped into all this espionage, and her recent character as a preggers teenager is hard to erase as you watch her play Lady of the Matrix, giving her presence in the film a feeling of odd displacement. That’s exactly the delicious off-kilterness that makes a movie like this work.

What it may not do quite as well is provide a justification for it all. The absent wife in this movie has a proposition for Cobb, which we may or may not believe. But unlike the elaborate dream-worlds that Cobb has constructed, it isn’t that much of a puzzle. We never really get to see why Cobb has made his choices, or what drives him to bury them so deep, and it leaves the emotion of the film a bit hollow.

I think Nolan wanted the audience to feel that they were left with a mystery, and he has a nice little top (a “totem”) that singles that for us. It's interesting that our culture has seemingly become most entertained by depictions of distortions of reality, or people who have essentially entered into their own dream worlds. Perhaps that says something about the flexible reality our culture now traffics in. For most of us, this is starting to get old hand, and many in the audience will have guessed the end (or should I say, the open-ended ending question) half-way through. Total Recall ended with a similar brain teaser (as did the "Moriarty" Star Trek episodes about the holodeck), and though Nolan's mystery doesn't add up nearly as neat as these, it still has incredible synchronicity, like a supersized sci-fi opera.

The real mystery then is how Nolan has turned a series of pop-culture dream states into an entertaining action vehicle. The movie may not have the subtle genius of a Memento, but it has all the exotic sets, free-floating angst, and high-octane explosions to make it perhaps the biggest hit of the summer season.

Greenberg: Midlife Crisis for Generation X

If you were born in the Sixties or early Seventies, and have a friend (or perhaps this is you, yourself) who never quite gave up that college dream of "making it big" as an artist, and so have toiled half your life away in menial jobs holding on to your diminishing dreams while the world has moved on around you, then you’ll understand the movie Greenberg, staring Ben Stiller as the irascible artiste nursing fifteen years of regret.

Understand, though maybe not really enjoy. The problem with this movie may be that the characterization of Greenberg is too spot on. Even in his forties, the guy has never quite given up on some impossible, childish, classically romantic idea of an artist who can remain “pure” from economic compromises and who castigates everyone around him who has decided to live in reality. Such a purely distilled ego comprised of high self-opinion, dashed dreams, and anti-establishment ideology cannot function normally in the world for long, and Greenberg has been recently released from a mental institution and decided to come live, for a time, in the house of his successful brother in LA, while his brother and family go on a trip to Viet Nam. He immediately begins annoying his old friends and acquaintances as he attempts to keep his shit together in day-to-day reality.

Greenberg – compromised as he is – has two charges he needs to look out for, his brother’s dog (a big, furry sad-eyed canine of pure innocence) and his brother’s personal assistant, an equally sad-eyed girl named Florence who casually sleeps around and reacts to Greenberg’s unpredictable temper with an equal mix of wonder and passive-aggressive seduction.

Writers Noah Baumbach and Jennifer Jason Leigh have created a really marvelous script of casual conversation, impromptu parties, dangerous edge, and illuminating comparisons (the party where Greenberg interacts with a group of brash, egotistical twenty-year-olds – telling them about how disappointing their lives will be and castigating their musical tastes – is the thematic heart of the movie and as compelling a portrait of Generation X deterioration and Millennial conflict as I’ve ever seen on film). Stiller is also perfectly suited for the role, going deep into the character and portraying brilliantly a psyche that is both over intellectualized and deeply distorted. That is, there is a lot of good work in this movie and the raves from critics are justified.

At the same time – and perhaps, this is just me, but I suspect there are others who will feel similarly – I just did not enjoy watching this character. I really do know people like this and they are infuriating enough in real life. Like my real-life friends, I kept wanting to reach out and slap Greenberg in the face and say, “snap out of it.” Fifteen years before, Greenberg and his two friends had a band, and they were offered a record deal, but Greenberg decided he didn’t want to have to deal with a recording studio and backed out of the deal, leaving his other two friends stranded. The band dissolved, and the three of them have been nursing this wound ever since.

That IS real life, and though the film does deliver a well-earned catharsis around this issue, coming at the age of forty and for a personality that still doesn’t quite get what he did wrong, I find the outlook punishing more than uplifting.

Maybe what bothers me is this: that instead of being on a trajectory of life, where losses are lessons in how to become stronger, Greenberg illustrates a character in stagnation, who is watching the world pass by and can only lash out randomly. For some viewers, that will make this movie seem like an hour and a half of pointless talking and heartache, since there is no character arch here to speak of, just character "ack."

Greenberg and Florence do finally enter into some semblance of a relationship, though even that is too sketchy to really earn the word. As I’ve said, all of this is illustrated with supreme craft and care, and some truly nice insights into the artist’s dilemma and growing older. I just wish I could have enjoyed Greenberg’s misery as much as he seems to.

Despicable Me: Spy Versus Spy Meets Bugs Bunny Humor in Postmodern Suburbia

A six-year-old child is just beginning to form cognitive connections about the outside world. They are beginning to understand other people, that things can happen in the future, and that there is such a thing as lying.

This new found awareness of tense, truth/falsity, and otherness also imparts the six to nine-year-old with a heightened awareness of jokes, riddles, and fantasy games. They suddenly "get" that people may not mean what they say, that someone can play a joke on someone else. Essentially, they suddenly understand the concept of irony, and they like it.

Or rather, one might say - as with a new found taste for peanut butter and playing doctor - they love it.

The most beloved childhood comic animations understand the six-year-old infatuation with simple irony. Think Bugs Bunny and his turning the tables on Elmer Fudd (six year olds also get such seemingly adult humor as Road Runner defying gravity when Coyote cannot, or Bugs Bunny in drag).

What's astute about Despicable Me, the latest animation from Universal Studios (the studio that brought us The Tale of Despereaux), is that it understands the six-year-old mind at least as well as Bugs Bunny ever did, and goes after guffaw after guffaw with an old-fashioned evil-genius rivalry and some easy sentimentality borrowed from Pixar. That's fantastic, if you're a six year old. If you're the adult accompanying them, well, the movie manages to be entertaining for a good hour and a half, and there are worse things you could be doing with your time.

Despicable Me starts from the premise of making a kind of Austin Powers-esque villain into the movie's hero. Gru (voiced by Steve Carroll) is an evil genius with a nifty lair and a freeze-ray gun whose despicable genius was never understood by his indifferent mother, but whose manages to eek out a decent living managing an underground hive of cute worker minions and a British evil scientist (voiced by Russell Brand), whose collective job it is to get into endearing mischief and occasionally perform mass mayhem.

The film's conceit is that Gru is secretly a softy who simply needs to express his fatherly tendencies in order to actualize his suburban existence while at the same time achieving the grand success that has so far eluded him (he has ambitions to shrink the moon, so he can steal it). Gru adopts three orphan girls, initially thinking they will suit his purposes combating his arch rival - the new evil upstart, Vector - only to find that he actually likes the annoying little things.

When real-life suburban spies are being uncloaked on the news, one can almost say this movie was prescient for setting its cold-war combat amongst the yuppie background of the modern suburbs. Gru versus Vector has a bit of a throwback Spy Versus Spy feel (the movie gets its humor executing Road-Runner-esque setups of various ray guns, shrink rays, and evil experiments going off), perhaps updated with a PC versus Mac art direction that places Gru squarely in the less sexy arena of the tried but true PC who must best his younger and nimbler Mac-ified rival.

There are some jokes here that adults will appreciate (the Lehman Brothers joke is worth an out-loud laugh), but most of the humor, well-executed as it is, is strictly of the Fart Gun kind. Those chattering minions are designed with evil genius as well: perfect for lunch boxes and fast food glasses, they are a kind of perfection of movie merchandising, and their appearance in the film as a kind of yellow Thebian chorus serves mainly as branding of themselves.

Most of the story seems borrowed from a recent Pixar movie - Up - which featured a similar crotchety old guy learning to open his heart to an annoying six-year-old. The genius of Up that this movie misses has to do with the depth of character and the facility with human insight. These characters lack the human contextualization that Pixar has become so grand at providing. Instead, even as their movie is 3D-ified, the characters exist purely in the 2D world of cartoon stereotypes. Gru eventually finds himself torn between attending the girls' dance recital and his plot to steal the moon, but it's an artificial choice (he decides to do both), and even if he's ready to adopt these girls, the only real difference between them and the masses of other minions already under his care is that they're not yellow.

In other words, he was a softy from the start - a plush huggable toy that's menacing enough to be funny to a six year old, as are the rest of the creations. The movie takes great care to get all the jokes right, and it goes after its young audience relentlessly. Judging from the reaction of all of the kiddies in the audience, they loved it.

Top Ten 4th of July Movies of All Time

What makes a great Fourth of July movie? It has to be a summer tent-pole flick, sure. It has to be big – with top stars, obscene budgets, and an A-list director. But it also needs to capture something else to be a really good July 4th event. It needs to have a theme that resonates with the American character: something about patriotism, or heroism, individualism, or just plain goofy joy. It needs to have a really imaginative, scary, menacing bad guy: an invading army, a killer animal, an unstoppable machine, icky bugs, an evil genius, a big rock about to destroy the world. It needs to set these two forces up in opposition, so that the American heroes are tested sorely, the big-bad-world-destroying whatever is about to crush/eat/destroy everyone, and our heroes rescue the world but not without some serious loss of life. And it needs plenty of fun and fireworks – sarcastic quips, things going boom, laser beams, rock music, and maybe some beer and cigars. It essentially needs to be a big block party/fireworks show on a movie screen, and it needs to be really really fun.

With this in mind, then, I unveil my selections for the top ten 4th of July movies of all time. Please feel free to comment or add your own suggestions in the comments section at the end.

10. Men in Black (1997) – Riffing on FBI agents chasing down cartoonish aliens, this Will Smith helmer was most successful when indie-film regular Vincent D’Onofrio did his shtick as an outer-space bug wearing a not-too-well-fitted person suit. More coolly kooky than ferocious, Smith sashayed through the movie and we got a new spin on the term “bug zapper.”

9. Live Free or Die Hard (2007) – This fourth installment of the Die Hard franchise opened the week before the 4th and posited a technological “fire sale” that causes mass chaos by shutting down the power grid. Invokes a nice sense of America’s new-found fear of going dark. Also a nice combination of Justin Long techno-geek wiz-kid-ism with old-fashion beat-em-up Bruce Willis stunts. Features a cool villain in the form of Timothy Olyphant as a villainous super-hacker and some great old-fashion flying car crack-ups and blown-up buildings, it successfully rebooted a long-in-the-tooth franchise.

8. Armageddon (1998) – Jerry Bruckheimer has seemingly staked a perpetual claim on 4th of July weekend with the Transformer movies, but Armageddon is probably the his better entry. There’s nothing like saving the world from an impending asteroid to stir up the appropriate jingoistic joys. This movie – like most Bruckheimer fare – is a bit too self-congratulatory for me to fully enjoy (the slow-mo hero shots go on interminably), but it does capture the spirit of the weekend well, with a classic Aerosmith soundtrack and plenty of fresh corn from Bruce Willis.

7. Spider Man 2 (2004) – The original Spider Man debuted to block-long crowds and rave reviews. It was the first time a comic-book movie had “heart” – or enough character development to make you both thrill and cry. Most important, the movie struck at the heart of teenager-dom and hit a chord with young audiences and adults alike. Spider Man 2 reprised the magic on the 4th of July with a better villain (Doc Oc) and some serious soul searching for Spidey.


6. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) – Once more into the breach, dear Terminator. This time, new director Jonathan Mostow gave us a lovely but deadly female Terminator with flaming firepower and some great careening chases. It was what we’d come to expect from Terminator movies, but it delivered.

5. The Patriot (2000) – Mel Gibson and a hot new kid named Heath Ledger teamed up to give us a unique poli-sci lesson on the American Revolution (a subject one might think would be more popular this time of year). This film stays away from history class clichés by illustrating a family of young fighters and an American army more suggestive of a terrorist insurgency than the organized military we know today. Intriguing and filled with enough battles to qualify it as “action packed,” the real heart of this film was Ledger, who with his soulful eyes and youthful vim stole the show, and established himself as a leading talent.

4. Back to the Future (1985) - Marty McFly won our hearts with his skateboard and time-traveling Delorian in the first movie that really set out from the start to create a fourth-of-July weekend craze and delivered on its promise. That makeup to age his parents wasn’t too convincing, but boy did that time travel paradox of Marty interrupting his own insemination make us scratch our heads. The movie may seem tame, now, but is was racing to catch lightning, and it did.

3. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) – The first Terminator was a cult classic, but when James Cameron came back to reprise his surprise hit from a decade before, you knew he was after something both new and big: and he didn’t disappoint. Terminator 2 took the idea of the metallic unstoppable killer and “kicked it up a notch,” creating a coolly modern, seemingly indestructible and infinitely adaptable silicon assassin and an endless chase scene that decimated cars, houses, buildings, trucks, and pretty much anything in its path. The brilliantly staged assault on the Cyberdyne building was an instant action-flick classic and has served as a blueprint for numerous top sci-fi battles, including the Transformer series, the Matrix movies, and too many others to count.

2. Independence Day (1996) – One of only two movies on our list that actually takes place over July 4th weekend, Independence Day was both an end-of-the-world sci-fi thriller and a feel-good all-American celebration of patriotism. It simultaneously resurrected the destruction/disaster movie and established Roland Emmerich as a tent-pole director (though it’s seemingly all been downhill for him since there). Independence Day’s scenes of iconic buildings being blown up by invading aliens set the tone both for future summer movies (Die Hard 4 gives a knowing nod) as well as our reaction to real-life terrorism (many people I know compared watching September 11th to this film). Helmed by Will Smith at his peak, with a snarky Jeff Goldblum to boot, this one is perhaps the perfect blend of popcorn, fireworks, and summer sci-fi.

1. Jaws (1975) – Released in the second half of June, the movie takes place over the 4th of July weekend, and it was the same weekend in 1975 when Jaws became a smash hit and literally invented the summer blockbuster. Spielberg practically created the classic villain with his seemingly intelligent killer shark (which we hardly ever got to see) and that iconic music. Probably the perfect thriller, no one will listen to Roy Scheider’s police chief Martin Brody as he struggles to close the beaches – no one, that is, but a hippie oceanographer and a scrappy old fisherman. When they three of them go out to face the shark alone, the movie becomes pure genius.

MicMacs: Jean-Pierre Jeunet Makes Serious Fun

The latest film from French Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen, City of Lost Children, Amelie) once is again full of the type of whimsy that the director has become famous for. A young boy, Bazil, loses his father to a land mind; later, as an adult, he’s hit by a stray bullet while tending to his station in a video store. The bullet becomes lodged in his brain, leaving him susceptible to death at any moment. Due to the accident he loses his job, becomes homeless, and falls in with a troop of underground salvagers who restore discarded junk. One day, while hauling some salvaged scraps home, Bazil drives past a pair of buildings – arms merchants, both, responsible for the land mind that killed his father as well as the bullet in his brain – and hatches a plot to extract his revenge.

The underlying subject may seem both serious and timely – the arms merchants supply weapons to wars around the world, including terrorists and the states combating them. But MicMacs wants instead to revel in a comedy of underlings scumbling about to combat powerful bad guys (the CEO’s of the two companies). Essentially a Clay Shirky “Here Comes Everybody” treatise on the power of the individual to take down the corporation (the original translation of the title means “non-stop shenanigans”), MicMacs has our heroes assemble a series of intricate Rube Goldberg devices and improvisational theater out of salvaged parts and recirculated clichés, all to attack what the bad guys hold most dear (their possessions) and extract embarrassing confessions.

Jeunet’s style, ever so entertaining, is once again to pull together a Dada-ist ensemble of circus-like characters (including a contortionist, a human cannonball, and a woman who can measure distances and speeds by simple observation) along with flickering montages of seemingly re-used film clips and illustrated flashbacks. I found the effect of this film startlingly refreshing. Jeunet has been doing his art-house/clown-like approach to film for a while, but when you compare this movie with other contemporary fare (whether it be the serious animated melodrama of Toy Story or the knowing earnestness of film-festival favorites like Holofcenter or DeFelitta), the difference in approach and tone is dramatic. Where much of film these days has taken on a life-or-death seriousness, Jeunet insists on finding the play and whimsy even in the most serious of subject matters. That’s a strong point of view to hang out in the wind against the prevailing zeitgeist, and you may, as I did, really appreciate it. In comparison today’s self-serious fare, MicMacs may seem lightweight and even a bit silly. But it’s a very smart and calculated silliness – one designed to tickle our sense of life-and-death propriety (even the doctors operating on Bazil’s bullet take time to wax philosophic), while at the same time allowing us to indulge in our heroic revenge fantasies. It’s precisely this break from convention that makes this movie so satisfying as well as entertaining.

In the end, Bazil and his new-found friends enact an almost “Mission Impossible”-like dramaturge designed to extract their revenge on the two hapless CEO’s (who are both natural enemies as well as compatriots). When Jeunet reveals the set-up, he does so with the usual flair for amusing re-enactment, and the gag is well worth waiting for. In the end, Bazil has his revenge, as well as a new family – indeed, he has his life back. Since it’s at the expense of both CEO’s, Jeunet seems to be implying that this is a zero-sum game: that there are winners, and losers, and often power makes the difference.

This time, YouTube makes the difference, and the final sequence of amused web surfers is Jeunet’s most “realistic” portrait he’s given us of our modern world to date. Jeunet has always been the champion of the ordinary guy, a clown who wants us to understand the pathos and joy in the bumblers and the castaways, a giddy populist railing against the fat cats. This film is no exception, but perhaps, finally, events are catching up with him.